The Distributed Party Of 'We' Is Already In Control

from the this-ain't-no-tea-party dept

I tend not to be much of a believer in political "parties." They always seem to get lost in groupthink around what's best for "the party," rather than what's best, period. I even tend to have issues with groups like The Pirate Party. While I support many of the ideals and concepts within the party's platform, I don't agree with everything they have to say, and still think the use of "pirate" in the name, while attention grabbing and perhaps useful in the short-term, is quite limiting long-term. And yet, I'm certainly intrigued by a lot of what's been happening over the past few months, in terms of somewhat ad hoc groups coming together and protesting things they just know are not right. While I still don't agree with the denial of service tactics of "Anonymous" and its Operation Payback, I've been saying for a while that this really is a moment when centralized top-down legacy systems are coming into conflict with distributed, decentralized, bottom-up systems -- and not understanding them at all.

Michael Scott points us to an opinion piece from lawyer Douglas Wood, in which he does a nice job describing what he refers to as "The Party of We," which he notes is already in control.

I think that final point is the part that is the most interesting, and the least understood in many of the discussions around what's happening online. In the past, with traditional systems, if you didn't agree with something, you would just protest. But if you look at what's been happening lately, when the public doesn't agree with something -- official secrecy, draconian copyright laws, censorship, privacy violations, etc. -- rather than just protesting, they're simply routing around those things. It's an incredibly important point. They're not protesting by saying "this will not stand." They're protesting by saying "your laws don't matter, because we can simply route around them."

That's a hell of a lot more powerful than most people realize.

Of course, I already know that some will mock this, saying that it's just a bunch of kids (probably "entitled" kids -- or maybe "freeloading" kids) "breaking the law" and such. Or they'll say that the recent arrests of a few folks show that they can't really route around the system. But I think that significantly underestimates the long-term impacts of what's happening. Whether or not you want to call it the "We Party," it does seem clear that a large (and growing) group of people have realized that code trumps laws, and no matter what laws are put in place to try to beat back code, code will always win.

What's most important is the tipping point, spawned not by Assange but by a new body politic -- a new party of individuals bonded by commonality of interest not defined by national or geographic boundaries. The Party of We.

In response to the attacks on Wikileaks, this virtual We Party, comprised of citizens of the world, unleashed an unprecedented -- and united -- attack on parts of the infrastructure that transact payments and sustain eCommerce and for a brief moment shut critical parts of it down.

This was unprecedented not because it hasn't been tried before (even with some success), but because its success, however brief the moment may have been, was only reversed by those who started it and who had a change of heart. Furthermore, it was novel in its motivation not to hack a system or engage in fraud or greed, but rather in support of a cause -- a belief in the idea and purity of unencumbered speech.

What's left out of this is that it's not actually a party. It's not actually an organization at all, which is part of what makes it so powerful. With an organization you can attack the organization or cut off its head. When it's just a whole bunch of people who understand the power of technology, plucking out a few people that can be tracked down does nothing other than attract more people to the power of code.

Whether or not you agree with the concept of "The We Party," or what they're doing, it's difficult to not recognize that what's been happening is significant, meaningful and important.

While our ability to get the corporates government to repeal its tyrant laws (ie: 95+ year copy protection lengths) maybe atomically small, it's ability to enforce those tyrant laws on us is orders of magnitude smaller.

There are way more of us than there are of them (hence our labor hours used to break these laws exceeds their labor hours to catch us) and many of us are far more tech savy than most law enforcement and govt employees and most corporate lawyers who keep suing everyone. Not that I support infringement, just that the reality of the matter is that it can't and won't be stopped or even noticably affected by what the government does.

Heck, many entire corporations (even medium sized corporations with a few hundred employees and computers and often big ones even) have pirated versions of windows and other software on every computer that they use. Software piracy is very common in the business and corporate world and corporations can afford to hire techs to figure out how to crack various software and operating systems. From there it's possible that the cracked software eventually makes its way to other corporations and eventually to the general public.

Only some laws

I don't really disagree with what Mike is saying, but it seems like kind of an overstatement, because it only applies in certain narrow cases. You can't code around getting beaten by a cop, or having your car seized, or any number of "meatspace" laws and situations that adversely affect citizens. There are certain areas where enforcement is ineffective, but I don't think it's accurate to say the party of We is in control generally.

The Distributed Party..

Can you reduce the cost of health care?

Right now, my single greatest monthly bill is my health care insurance. I come from a military family, so the idea of universal health care has appeal because that's what I had as a kid. But I don't really care what solution we implement as long as it makes health care more affordable. How do we translate the Party of We into lower health care costs?

Re: Only some laws

Re: Can you reduce the cost of health care?

WE start learning how to produce our on medicine, and we start supporting things like Patch Adams M.D. & Gesundheit! Institute that have apparently metastasized and have 2 daughters institutions, this is how we go around a system that does not care about people.

Most anti-biotics come from natural that can be cultivated and produced by anyone, the destilation process is the hard part but not impossible to be done by someone we just need to learn how to do it.

Well, duh! Technology ("code") only follows the laws of nature, and those overrule the laws of man by definition. Just as you can't order the wind to stop blowing, you can't order information to stop being infinitely replicable.

But yeah, as long as governments have the power to act like thugs (and police forces everywhere have long ceased to protect their own citizens, they are no more than thugs nowadays), the battle is not won.

Re: Re: Can you reduce the cost of health care?

Thanks for the Adams' link. I actually hung out with him a bit when he was in Boulder for the 2002 and 2003 Conference on World Affairs, but hadn't thought about his communal hospital vision until you reminded me of it.

At the 2003 conference I was standing next to him when he placed a red clown nose and a frog hat on the former president of Zambia, who was also attending. It was a positive gesture on Adams' part and a fond memory of mine.

Talking About YouTube Again

On my YouTube channel is a show from Canada with three seasons. Season one is up. Season two is up. Season three is blocked worldwide from YouTube due to a copyright claim by an Australian broadcaster. You work that one out. In the meantime, fans of the show, of which there are many, are very happy with my workaround.

My workaround: I put up download links to each and every episode of the third season to download for free from MegaUpload.

It sucks as it means the production company doesn't get the oppourtunity to monetize my uploads of their show if they ever decided to do so through YouTube. But if they ever decide to monetize it, they will have to unblock it, at which time I will happy upload the episodes to YouTube. Until then, I've got some happy viewers who have learned how to work around YouTube's restrictions.

As part of a German-Indo collaboration, researchers from the Helmholtz Centre in Braunschweig, Germany, have shared a process to make a much cheaper version of insulin. Published in the online research magazine ‘Microbial Cell Factories,’ the open-source drug-making process is freely accessible and is not subject to patent law.

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There are some good resources there. I've thought about something like this:

Open-Source Healthcare: "Imagine, for example, a cooperative clinic at the neighborhood level. It might be staffed mainly with nurse-practitioners or the sort of 'barefoot doctors' mentioned above. They could treat most traumas and ordinary infectious diseases themselves, with several neighborhood clinics together having an MD on retainer (under the old “lodge practice” which the medical associations stamped out in the early 20th century) for more serious referrals."
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I'm in good health and typically never need to see a doctor. I always pay into more in health insurance than the health insurance needs to pay out to cover me. But I understand the concept -- I'm paying into a pool that will be used to treat other people and, if I do need major medical treatment, will be used to cover me. My main concern is that my insurance goes up every year and isn't likely to stop doing that. Unless there are ways to reduce the overall costs of health care, if not across the country, then at least in my region, then sooner or later I can't afford the insurance and no one else can either. Even as they find cost saving measures in one area (like generic drugs), they come up with expensive treatments in other areas, which get billed back to the insurance companies, who then turn around and raise everyone's rates.

I suppose Kaiser is the closest thing we have to a national cooperative, but its rates are actually more than I am paying for Blue Cross.

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In my mind I don't understand why you pay into a pool that is not going to revert to your benefit, a insurance company is a company looking to profit and there is nothing wrong with that except that it doesn't really care about you or anyone else and they don't have competitors really, exclusive contracts take care of that and to compound the problem insurances helps to inflate prices on the medical side, one thing I know about medical care is that doctors love insurance, they get to charge inflated prices and the insurance pays it all they have no incentive to reduce costs because they too want more money.

But if you think about it why can't people make their own resource pools that will not be only about money but other resources like food, raw materials for drug production, buildings, tele-medicine(like in India where people get those barefoot doctors assisted by the internet, don't vote yes for metered internet is bad for your health in the future)

People could produce the raw materials for the production of medicines and use volunteer at local clinics and hospitals to produce the final products that is another way to bring costs down, also people could make Victory Garderns and give to hospitals and clinics food reducing the costs not only for patients but for medical workers bringing down costs.

What else can people do in a open source healthcare system?

I think a lot those are just general ideas that need to mature a bit more but really what is stopping anyone from do it?

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But if you think about it why can't people make their own resource pools that will not be only about money but other resources like food, raw materials for drug production, buildings, tele-medicine(like in India where people get those barefoot doctors assisted by the internet, don't vote yes for metered internet is bad for your health in the future)

People could produce the raw materials for the production of medicines and use volunteer at local clinics and hospitals to produce the final products that is another way to bring costs down, also people could make Victory Garderns and give to hospitals and clinics food reducing the costs not only for patients but for medical workers bringing down costs.

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Here's something from a recent article that shows how we can probably significantly reduce societal medical costs if we can help the subset that uses the most medical care.

Lower Costs and Better Care for Neediest Patients : The New Yorker: "His calculations revealed that just one per cent of the hundred thousand people who made use of Camden’s medical facilities accounted for thirty per cent of its costs. That’s only a thousand people—about half the size of a typical family physician’s panel of patients."

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A lot of what Brenner had to do, though, went beyond the usual doctor stuff. Brenner got a social worker to help Hendricks apply for disability insurance, so that he could leave the chaos of welfare motels, and have access to a consistent set of physicians. The team also pushed him to find sources of stability and value in his life. They got him to return to Alcoholics Anonymous, and, when Brenner found out that he was a devout Christian, he urged him to return to church. He told Hendricks that he needed to cook his own food once in a while, so he could get back in the habit of doing it. The main thing he was up against was Hendricks’s hopelessness. He’d given up. “Can you imagine being in the hospital that long, what that does to you?” Brenner asked.

Healthcare is more then just hospitals, there is the environment you are in that people can change to make things better.

Re: Only some laws

Re: Re: Can you reduce the cost of health care?

See that sand over there? Most computer chips come from sand that can be just dug up by anyone, the making a Billions Dollar FAB is the hard but not impossible to be done by someone we just need to know how to do it. Merck, Pfizer, Abbot, etc pretty much have the drug R&D process figured out, kinda like Intel and AMD are pretty good at turning sand into chips. Lately new age do-gooders have pretty much killed the pharma industry though, due to just you kind of muzzy headed dreaming.

On the home production of medicines...
The people commenting are obviously young, healthy people who really only need major medical (for accidents) coverage.
Thinking you can make the medicines needed for major illnesses in your basement is bizarre. You probably can produce a few weak antibiotics in your bathtub but if you have anything more than a sinus infection they aren't going to be effective (and probably won't really be effective then, you'll just get better on your own because you are basically young and healthy).
Try to produce chemotherapy agents targeted to particular metabolic pathways in your home.
The way to make medicine cheaper?
1) Limit medical malpractice awards to cut back on defensive medicine. Much of what is done in medicine to limit the chance of malpractice suits. This is not bad behavior on the doctor's part but on the lawyer's part.
2) Increase co-pays until people only go to the doctor when they really need to. Limit medical coverage to actual life saving, major medical procedures. Don't cover knee replacements because while they are wonderful, they aren't necessary, just very nice to have. If someone wants a knee replaced, they can pay for it out of pocket or do without.
3) Allow medical insurance costs to be based on risk (like life insurance). Otherwise the young and healthy pay too much to subsidize the old and sick.
If you think modern industrialized technology can be replaced by communal amateurs you will be dying in the cold darkness. The most important advances in life expectancy were based on lots of clean hot water and vaccines. Only a complex, integrated industrial society can produce the energy, knowledge, and techniques to support current life spans. One hundred years ago (within many people alive today lifetime) the average American lived half as long today. We will go back to that in 10 years unless we hold our current technology together.

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Another thing about big pharma they only produce things for treatments no cures that is bad, so others need to step in to fill that gap, besides I thought the whole patent things was to give the knowledge in the end to the public so everybody could benefit, what is the problem in getting all those old drugs and start producing them for people?

Yes it will reduce the market share for big pharma, so they will need to do more R&D to stay relevant and stop thinking just about money because it is not working for people, they don't have the money to pay for anything anymore they are completely at the mercy of those big companies and insurers that don't have their best interests at heart, it is hurting the population and you want us to do nothing?

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Black markets can produce just about any of these medicines, and they do. The problem is that black markets aren't regulated by the FDA and so it's probably difficult to ensure a lack of dangerous contaminants. (Sure, you can probably test for some of them, but I would say it's mostly impractical for several reasons).

Nobody wants to hear it, but the easiest way to reduce health costs is to quit socializing them, and put the actual costs of the treatment on to the individual receiving the treatment. This would include things like posted price lists and up front payment for services. The fact that hospitals and doctors set prices based on the recoverable percentage from the insurance industry and government is a large driver of the increasing costs.

The Distributed Party Of We

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Are you saying people can't make penicillin and Tetracycline?
I also saw there that people can produce insulin.

Those medicines that people can't produce by themselves probably need raw materials that people can produce in large quantities and use central factories in hospitals and clinics to achieve the final product how is that not possible?

The knowledge to do it is in the patents system so people can go there and mine all those medicines to start production again and fallow the FDA guidelines which will cost money.

We also have the means to do a QA in different parts using modern technology(i.e. barcodes).

If you think it is impossible that is fine, I believe it is possible and it is time to start doing it, and I prefer to die in the cold, then to be enslaved by some people.

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Not going to happen, unless the system collapses which is any day now. To much politics involved.

If you want to stop the socialization of healthcare you can stop using it and create new alternatives, which is where open source healthcare comes in.

The Chinese have a good concept, people pay their doctors when they are healthy and pay nothing when they are ill, is like insurance but the money don't go to a company that basically is a clearing house to how the money is spent.

Re: Only some laws

I have to agree with Nasch in that as technology is not the solution to everything, so it is not with the corporate state as well. If this were not so, the protests in Egypt could have been stopped with shutting technology down.

Instead, tech is a facilitator of ideas. It's the protests that did the trick.

Re: Can you reduce the cost of health care?

Simple: Get rid of government restrictions and open it up to the free market. Let people freely choose their doctor and his qualifications. Let people freely choose their medications.

It's basic supply and demand economics. The demand is fixed, the government restricts the supply (competition), and prices are as a result high. Protected markets don't produce the lowest prices.

Of course, the doctors unions, etc. are firmly opposed to free markets. And there is a huge law enforcement apparatus to make people go through government approved doctors to get medications. As long as you have all that, you're going to pay the price for it.

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Is a good idea to have someone care about your health and not the money, if you are unhealthy you don't see money, the doctor doesn't try to cheat you out of care, do an insurance company feels the need to heal someone to get paid?

Code trumps law?

it does seem clear that a large (and growing) group of people have realized that code trumps laws, and no matter what laws are put in place to try to beat back code, code will always win.

This reminds me of the old idea that young people always think that they're the first ones to discover sex. You could say a similar thing about every corner of the law. I'm sure in the 1920s, some other young idealist was saying something like, "They can draw white lines on the road, but we'll drive where we please and park wherever we damn well please. Steel trumps law."

And in time, the government slowly added more regulation. The young punks cursed but pretty much everyone else welcomed the regulation because they like the safety and the order. The parking meters are smarter than ever and the databases track the scofflaws so they can't reregister their car. Anyone caught driving without a license goes to jail. Now you can still drive wherever you want, drink whatever you want, and park wherever you want. Steel and booze still trump laws, but scofflaws are fewer and further between. The most flagrant ones are in jail and the others are nickled and dimed by the parking tickets.

So you can go on dreaming that a few punks can write their little P2P code and you can dream up more sophistries to pretend that linking is not infringement, but in the end the professionals will slowly put up more barbed wire fences and lock down the frontier.

"Bah. No way. Everyone loves freedom," you'll protest but at the end of the day people like professional content. They are willing to pay to watch a $100m movie from those evil folks in Hollywood. It's more fun than mousing around on YouTube looking at another cat riding on a Roomba.

Hollywood will use this money to pay for the barbed wire and the people will support it because they like professional content.

So this brings me to the corollary: code trumps outlaws. Sometimes code will enforce laws. I remember a bunch of dreamy-eyed crypto freaks telling me that crypto was going to create a nirvana where everyone would have personal privacy. What did Steve Jobs do with it? Why he insists that everything running on his iPhones come with a cryptographic signature. Here code is enforcing the law. Code trumps outlaws.

Now you might say that the clever coders are still out there coming up with jailbreaks. Perhaps but we need to remember that only a few curious folks are willing to bother with it and they usually only do it once. Only the rich are willing to risk bricking their phone because only the rich can afford it. Once again the frequent updates and continual drip of new apps pretty much guarantees that there's no much to be gained by stepping outside the law. Code trumps outlaws.

Re: Re: Re: Can you reduce the cost of health care?

Re: Code trumps law?

Jailbreak?

People just use Android, didn't you hear it? Android surpassed Apple in sales.

Put the barbwire everywhere people will just find legal solutions LoL

Can you mandate people not to go to Jamendo, can you mandate people not to watch the thousands of shows on Miro? Will anybody prohibit mini blimps flying on top of a game and streaming the video of that game to others? will you be able to prohibit people from streaming the game from their cellphones to a service the rejoin the video into a 3D dimensional space for free(Microsoft open sourced the code)?

Re: Only some laws

"You can't code around getting beaten by a cop, or having your car seized, or any number of "meatspace" laws and situations that adversely affect citizens."

No you can not code around being beaten by a cop. If "Darpas Network Challenge", or china's "human flesh search engines" are any indication. You can however, after the fact, find and-or destroy the cop, the politician, the masked girl stepping on kittens and killing them with high heel shoes, the drunk politician that runs down a bunch of people, the list goes on. This is a trend that will grow world wide.

"but I don't think it's accurate to say the party of We is in control generally."

I beg to differ on this. Canada, this past week, is a perfect example of the party of we. Canadas CRTC is being forced to back down on metered broadband because of the public outcry over it. For the past several years Canadian politicians have been following peoples opinions online because this "party of we" trend is growing. It scares politicians everywhere. I have been predicting it will come to the US by 2015 +- 2 years for a while.

Also, I think the "party of we" is alot better than my "cyber flash mobs" tag on these events. So I am appropriating it. :)

Re:

Nobody wants to hear it, but the easiest way to reduce health costs is to quit socializing them, and put the actual costs of the treatment on to the individual receiving the treatment.

I believe having people understand the costs is part of the solution. People should be smarter health care shoppers. However, there are issues in limiting health care that have people on all sides of the political spectrum freaking out.

For example, some people don't believe in socialized health care, and yet want people in a vegetative state kept alive for years. Who pays for that? Families? And what if the families say, "Hey, we don't have the money to pay for this and we don't have the time to provide 24-hour round the clock care"?

Or what about situations where a person needs a transplant and can't pay? Are we going to be honest and say transplants only go to the rich because they are the only ones who can pay for it themselves?

That's why I brought up the whole health care issue in this topic. It's a complex one and hits at a lot of our societial values. We might be able to get online and block laws we don't like, but that doesn't get things done. So how do we care for those people who are sick but have no financial resources?

We've already got politicians who know how to block laws. What we still need are politicians who know how to get things done. Or we need to replace our governmental system with one that can make collective decisions. But, of course, we know that the collective will can be manipulated, so a pure democracy may not create a society everyone likes.

Gregory?

So you can go on dreaming that a few punks can write their little P2P code and you can dream up more sophistries to pretend that linking is not infringement,
but in the end the professionals will slowly put up more barbed wire fences and lock down the frontier.
Have you ever heard of asymmertric warfare?
The distributed and leaderless anarchist movement is capable of inflicting a very high economic damage on the system thereby driving up the cost of enforcing its rules.
The cycle begins with a coder breaking or circumventing the law and the The industry responding in kind, but the industry response usually inflicts a collatteral burden on the average consumer, and the coder like the terrorist has won a victory.
If the hacker can force the system to stretch its enforcement resources and make life a hell for the average consumer, the metric for success has been reached.
If every version of Sony's Playstation is cracked, Sony must constantly
allocate sparse resources to minimize the damage.

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Here are some other health care scenarios that we can ponder:

1. A guy on a motorcycle. Maybe he didn't wear a helmet, and he got in an accident and he's been severely injured. He put himself at risk by being on the motorcycle, and more at risk by not wearing a helmet. Should we make him responsible for his health care, and if he doesn't have the funds, not treat him?

2. If people smoke cigarettes and then get lung cancer, should we let them go without treatment if they can't pay? Or should we put a health tax on cigarettes that goes directly into a lung cancer fund to pay for smokers who get cancer?

3. If a child is born with a disability, who is responsible for that care? What if the family can't or won't pay? Adoption or institutionalization have been options in the past. Are the institutions supported by the state or charity?

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1) Limit medical malpractice awards to cut back on defensive medicine. Much of what is done in medicine to limit the chance of malpractice suits. This is not bad behavior on the doctor's part but on the lawyer's part.

Some agreement. The current state of affairs is bad for doctors And patients. The only winner is lawyers.

2) Increase co-pays until people only go to the doctor when they really need to. Limit medical coverage to actual life saving, major medical procedures. Don't cover knee replacements because while they are wonderful, they aren't necessary, just very nice to have. If someone wants a knee replaced, they can pay for it out of pocket or do without.

Higher co-pays that ensure that you only go to the doctor when you "really need to" also encourage/force people to seek treatment only when they are in a life-threatening situation. "gee, this cough and fever are really bad and won't go away, but i've missed too much work to afford my co-pay and clinic visit. Guess i will just lay here until someone calls an ambulance to get me forty thousand dollars worth of pneumonia treatments that could have been prevented by a visit with a doctor and a twelve dollar prescription"

3) Allow medical insurance costs to be based on risk (like life insurance). Otherwise the young and healthy pay too much to subsidize the old and sick.

With the way current health insurance companies lobby in america, this would become their escape clause. Whats that? you once had mono? next price bracket. you used to take a prescription sleep aid? next price bracket.

Gods forbid you actually need any medical attention. "Due to your recent health assessment, our policy states that it would be best to move you into our highest bracket. Here is the prorated bill for the days since you went to the hospital, and here is next months plan. What? this is more then you can afford? I see.. let me just make a note 'refused medical care' There we are, have a good day! and be out of here in a half hour."

Re: Can you reduce the cost of health care?

You could reduce the prices a lot by decreasing lawsuits and encouraging healthcare facilities to hire a full staff of workers. If clinicians didn't get sued left and right for frivolous crap, and medical facilities staffed at reasonable levels you'd see prices and accidents drop. I know, I've seen it first hand.

Re: Gregory?

Ah, but remember that Playstations aren't cheap. Sony sells them at a loss. If the asymmetric hacker types win and deplete Sony's profits, Sony goes away and so do all of the Playstations. The Ghost of Christmas Future won't have anything to use to taunt kids:

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"There aren't enough police to whip everyone at once."

It again breaks down to 6 plus billion of us -vs- a couple hundred thousand or million of them. What happens if the majority decides to just do their own thing and ignore the PTB? It leads to interesting situations.

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Yeah, and for the most part, we can reduce the number of the people using the most medical care just by saying the words "loose some fucking weight or be last in line next time"

What's funny about this is that I live in a place where we live it. Boulder is very fit, very lean, very health conscious. And a lot of people explore alternative medicine as a way to have more control over their health care and to avoid "big business heath care."

So when Boulderites suggest that this might be a good way to live, the Tea Party people freak out and don't want to hear that unhealthy foods and too much car driving and not enough walking/cycling might be bad for them and it will end up increasing health care costs. There have even been Tea Party people who think encouraging more bicycle riding is a plot to take away their rights.

Re: Re: Gregory?

Didn't Sony try to do that? They were cool about people doing this at least until recently. There haven't been too many great examples of hardware companies trying to build a hacking community. Oh, I know about stuff in the back of Makers magazine, but projects like the open source cell phone have gone nowhere fast. And if the PC platform weren't so standardized, I'm not even sure Linux would be very big.

Basically almost everyone would have to wait until they need to go to the ER, because they couldn't afford anything out of pocket. Emergency medicine is among the most expensive, if not the most. That is the exact opposite of how to control health care costs, as well as provide the best care.

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Nobody wants to hear it because we're not interested in letting people lead agonizing physically miserable lives or die young because they don't happen to be wealthy enough to buy the health care they need.

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Basically almost everyone would have to wait until they need to go to the ER, because they couldn't afford anything out of pocket. Emergency medicine is among the most expensive, if not the most. That is the exact opposite of how to control health care costs, as well as provide the best care.

I specifically bought a policy that covers some basic preventative medical coverage at no expense to me so I would go in and get it done. I knew that if I had to pay for everything until my deductible was met, I would avoid going to the doctor if I thought I could put it off.

Re: Re: Re: Gregory?

I think Sony Entertainment has too much influence over the hardware parts of Sony. The other parts could benefit from the sort of thing you're talking about, but the entertainment arm is too afraid of it, so they try to lock everything down.

"when Boulderites suggest that this might be a good way to live, the Tea Party people freak out"

Yeah, hard core republicans side stepping and corrupting the tea party, what do you expect? "There can be only two" parties and the tea party is not one of them.

I older, and fast walk 30-60 minutes every day with 50-60 pounds of weights on me, walk up the stairs at work, and go for hikes. The doctor tells me I have low blood pressure, and low heart rate for my age, and perfect blood work. When I suggested maybe its because I work out and eat right. He said slow down on the working out, and some people just have good genes. He is an idiot, and I found a new doctor.

I say let the democrats, republicans and tea party types get trapped in the health care system they create.

Its less social security we have to deal with. (yeah I know ... health care costs) for a second there it was a great idea.

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Look "Dude" I've actually done synthetic chem as part of a drug discovery process at a big pharma company, I have a pretty good idea of what it takes, and as I grow older I really wouldn't want to depend of some hippies recapitulating the developement of the drug industry to get me my existing meds, let alone invent the ones I hope will let me live a few more years in comfort.
You are dreaming, sir.

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I really wouldn't want to depend of some hippies recapitulating the developement of the drug industry to get me my existing meds, let alone invent the ones I hope will let me live a few more years in comfort.

Re: Re:

It's not a matter of opinion, it's impossible to do what you are talking about. There's no need to die in the cold though, or to be enslaved, unless you think all work is slavery. Sounds like you need to grow up a bit.

Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Can you reduce the cost of health care?

" I really wouldn't want to depend of some hippies recapitulating the developement of the drug industry to get me my existing meds"

Unless the stuff is alive or man made like stem cells, biologically active, or an amino acid, or weird protein. I wouldn't worry. Organic chemistry is Organic chemistry. How else would the drug companies be able to produce the quanitity they do?

Re: Re: Re:

Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Can you reduce the cost of health care?

Dreams are part of the process for creation.

Except for heavy machinery all processes can be done at home.
You may not want medicine from a "hippie" but others who have no other recourse would like it very much, if you can afford medicine for all your needs that is all good, but you want others to not have a chance at getting treatment?

That is just wrong.

I have yet to see any process that can't be done at home, people just need the knowledge to do so, if you want to keep buying drugs from your big pharma company that is ok, in the meanwhile we the hippies will continue to advance production procedures inside homes to become efficient and secure, I agree that there are perils, but they are well worth the risk.

Re: Re: Re:

Impossible why?

How hard is to cultivate mold? or bacteria?
Besides there are other compounds that can be produced for hospitals like Hydrogen peroxide, alcohol.

How hard would it be to set up a local manufacturing lab for local clinics and hospitals for that purpose, where the community brew the ingredients or acquire them in the traditional form from others and deliver it to that little factory.

If it was impossible how do they did it in 1940? without any modern equipment?

Before that people used blue mold to heal wounds directly, we lost that knowledge of how to do things, it is time to get it back.

- Growing.
- Fermenting.
- Purifying.
- They all would have their own QA controls, it is important to divide the work so the QA controls can be executed one step at a time for all steps and redone for each time by any cell that receives something from, this guarantee's the best possible quality and discourage tempering since there is a high probability that anything wrong will be detected.
- Production or acquisition of raw materials.

Those can be tracked using barcodes, so each cell would have their own code to help identify any problems soon.
Reports of problems can be sent via the internet, help can be in-situ(face to face) in special cases but mostly done by the internet with conferencing software.

Of course this would exclude the very poor from being part of the process because they wouldn't have the means to do it by themselves so people could create centers in poor regions to give people willing to volunteer the chance to participate and learn something that could help them in the future what better way to learn science then to do it?

Re: Parties

Re: Code trumps law?

"And in time, the government slowly added more regulation. The young punks cursed but pretty much everyone else welcomed the regulation because they like the safety and the order. The parking meters are smarter than ever and the databases track the scofflaws so they can't reregister their car. Anyone caught driving without a license goes to jail. Now you can still drive wherever you want, drink whatever you want, and park wherever you want. Steel and booze still trump laws, but scofflaws are fewer and further between. The most flagrant ones are in jail and the others are nickled and dimed by the parking tickets."

Yet as more regulations are being added the number of people flouting the law appears to be increasing. It's very well to point to history as an example but your examples seem pretty narrow and limited. What about all the times that flouting the law did bring change? The civil rights movement, the suffrage movements, the American revolution, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the UK Poll Tax Riots. What about the failure of the war on drugs? You could argue that none of those examples are fair comparisons, but then they seem more fair than your example of 'some guys who didn't want to drive on the lines', which I'm not even sure was ever as you've portrayed it.

'"Bah. No way. Everyone loves freedom," you'll protest but at the end of the day people like professional content. They are willing to pay to watch a $100m movie from those evil folks in Hollywood. It's more fun than mousing around on YouTube looking at another cat riding on a Roomba. '

I'm not sure anyone would really care if Hollywood stopped making movies. Sure, there would be complaints, but I can't imagine an uproar if they just decided to pack it in. I can imagine an uproar if Youtube was shut down because Youtube is a communications platform. You might not care that you can't watch a cat on a Roomba, but the person who wants to share that cat on a Roomba will surely care, and the millions of others who want to share will also care.

"Hollywood will use this money to pay for the barbed wire and the people will support it because they like professional content. "

If people are willing to pay for professional content, as you suggest, then why would they need to try and bleed money out of people who aren't willing to pay for professional content? If not enough people are willing to pay then perhaps we just don't want such expensive movies after all.

"So this brings me to the corollary: code trumps outlaws. Sometimes code will enforce laws. I remember a bunch of dreamy-eyed crypto freaks telling me that crypto was going to create a nirvana where everyone would have personal privacy. What did Steve Jobs do with it? Why he insists that everything running on his iPhones come with a cryptographic signature. Here code is enforcing the law. Code trumps outlaws."

Eh? That example is just bizzare. The biggest issue about cryptology isn't how it can be misused to track you, that's an issue of proprietary rights. The biggest issue facing cryptology is probably the P=NP question.

"Now you might say that the clever coders are still out there coming up with jailbreaks. Perhaps but we need to remember that only a few curious folks are willing to bother with it and they usually only do it once."

What do you base that on? Did you count them? Even so, if only a few are needed to jailbreak then why would we have more than a few?

"Only the rich are willing to risk bricking their phone because only the rich can afford it."

Uh, the biggest proponent of open source in the phone industry is Nokia, who happens to also be the largest supplier of cheap smart phones. I have their super duper expensive N900, I jailbroke it by installing an application from the default repository and typing sudo gainroot in the terminal.

Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Can you reduce the cost of health care?

Re:

How would this help anyone but the healthy? Seriously. Do you realize how much dialysis, alone costs? Even the very wealthy would have issues paying for it. The result isn't lowered costs and healthier people, it's more funerals.

Re: Code trumps law?

I have to point out copyright is a legal construct that only occured with the statute of anne in 1709. It was a result of the printing press. Its intent was to control what printers produced and it was corrupted over time.

With 80 % of S Korea, 85% of spain, 65% of the UK, 50+% of the US, etc ,etc infringing. Do you think the passing of any law will change this?

Recently a porn studio got it right and decided to not sue copyright infringers. They realized that the videos are nothing more than promotion for other things. Products, advertising, etc.

Music, TV shows, etc have in the past been nothing but promotion for other things. Over the past 20 years the monopolies have allowed for a greater profit. That time is at an end.

Re: Code trumps law?

I have to point out copyright is a legal construct that only occured with the statute of anne in 1709. It was a result of the printing press. Its intent was to control what printers produced and it was corrupted over time.

With 80 % of S Korea, 85% of spain, 65% of the UK, 50+% of the US, etc ,etc infringing. Do you think the passing of any law will change this?

Recently a porn studio got it right and decided to not sue copyright infringers. They realized that the videos are nothing more than promotion for other things. Products, advertising, etc.

Music, TV shows, etc have in the past been nothing but promotion for other things. Over the past 20 years the monopolies have allowed for a greater profit. That time is at an end.

Re: Code trumps law?

I have to point out copyright is a legal construct that only occured with the statute of anne in 1709. It was a result of the printing press. Its intent was to control what printers produced and it was corrupted over time.

With 80 % of S Korea, 85% of spain, 65% of the UK, 50+% of the US, etc ,etc infringing. Do you think the passing of any law will change this?

Recently a porn studio got it right and decided to not sue copyright infringers. They realized that the videos are nothing more than promotion for other things. Products, advertising, etc.

Music, TV shows, etc have in the past been nothing but promotion for other things. Over the past 20 years the monopolies have allowed for a greater profit. That time is at an end.

Re: Code trumps law?

I have to point out copyright is a legal construct that only occured with the statute of anne in 1709. It was a result of the printing press. Its intent was to control what printers produced and it was corrupted over time.

With 80 % of S Korea, 85% of spain, 65% of the UK, 50+% of the US, etc ,etc infringing. Do you think the passing of any law will change this?

Recently a porn studio got it right and decided to not sue copyright infringers. They realized that the videos are nothing more than promotion for other things. Products, advertising, etc.

Music, TV shows, etc have in the past been nothing but promotion for other things. Over the past 20 years the monopolies have allowed for a greater profit. That time is at an end.

Re: Code trumps law?

I have to point out copyright is a legal construct that only occured with the statute of anne in 1709. It was a result of the printing press. Its intent was to control what printers produced and it was corrupted over time.

With 80 % of S Korea, 85% of spain, 65% of the UK, 50+% of the US, etc ,etc infringing. Do you think the passing of any law will change this?

Recently a porn studio got it right and decided to not sue copyright infringers. They realized that the videos are nothing more than promotion for other things. Products, advertising, etc.

Music, TV shows, etc have in the past been nothing but promotion for other things. Over the past 20 years the monopolies have allowed for a greater profit. That time is at an end.

Re: Code trumps law?

I have to point out copyright is a legal construct that only occured with the statute of anne in 1709. It was a result of the printing press. Its intent was to control what printers produced and it was corrupted over time.

With 80 % of S Korea, 85% of spain, 65% of the UK, 50+% of the US, etc ,etc infringing. Do you think the passing of any law will change this?

Recently a porn studio got it right and decided to not sue copyright infringers. They realized that the videos are nothing more than promotion for other things. Products, advertising, etc.

Music, TV shows, etc have in the past been nothing but promotion for other things. Over the past 20 years the monopolies have allowed for a greater profit. That time is at an end.

Re: Code trumps law?

I have to point out copyright is a legal construct that only occured with the statute of anne in 1709. It was a result of the printing press. Its intent was to control what printers produced and it was corrupted over time.

With 80 % of S Korea, 85% of spain, 65% of the UK, 50+% of the US, etc ,etc infringing. Do you think the passing of any law will change this?

Recently a porn studio got it right and decided to not sue copyright infringers. They realized that the videos are nothing more than promotion for other things. Products, advertising, etc.

Music, TV shows, etc have in the past been nothing but promotion for other things. Over the past 20 years the monopolies have allowed for a greater profit. That time is at an end.

Re: Re: Talking About YouTube Again

Re: Re: Talking About YouTube Again

You are entirely disrespectful.

You're entirely missing the point. The third season is being blocked from YouTube for reasons that appear to be arbitrary. But since information wants to be free[1] people have found a way around this behavior by the distributor.

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[1] No, that doesn't mean all information should be available at no cost. It means information wants to be communicated. Artificial impediments to this communication are doomed to fail.